Oh my goodness, after a week like this, we almost need two photo/cartoon/meme spreads. This week’s is without doubt the biggest and most politically incorrect Week in Pictures ever, and that’s before you get to the special video bonus for folks shivering to death in half the country from global warming climate change. And what’s up with Vice Groper Joe Biden? Is he planning on a post-Obama career in the »

KDS stands for “Koch Derangement Syndrome,” and it is known to cause politicians to engage in all manner of self-flagellation, most especially Harry Reid. There are two stories out today suggesting Reid is going to want to punch himself in the mirror even harder than he did at Christmas following the Dems’ 2014 midterm wipeout. The Washington Times reports today that Democratic Party strategists have concluded that their Koch obsession »

I think it was nearly three years ago that I wrote a series that ought to have been called “Hayek Tuesday” (because I wrote most of these entries on Tuesday mornings following a Monday night class at the Ashbrook Center that semester based mostly on Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty), with excerpts and observations drawn from that great political thinker and Nobel Prize winner. Subsequently there have been brief serials here »

The oceans are dying, says . . . just about everyone. Well at least the New York Times, which reported last month that “Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says.” And the Times never makes any factual mistakes; I checked to make sure this story wasn’t from Gail Collins. But to my amazement, there’s a broad study out in the latest issue of BioScience, a premier journal in the »

The term “Fisking” apparently originated with someone’s takedown of a really bad column by British journalist Robert Fisk about 10 years back. I never read anything by Fisk, but this is what the Urban Dictionary says: The word is derived from articles written by Robert Fisk that were easily refuted, and refers to a point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies. So we need a similar term for debunking the serial »

Somewhere the old social democrat Irving Howe wrote of his disgust with Tom Hayden and the New Left when it arose in the early 1960s, saying (if memory serves) after a contentious meeting with Hayden in New York that they were a bunch of “knowitall shits,” and writing in Dissent that the energy of the New Left was mostly “a gesture of moral rectitude.” Those New Left “gestures” of moral »

Of perhaps you can file this post under “If you’ve lost the Brookings Institution. . .” The center-liberal Brookings Institution reported last week on the range of surveys of presidential experts (mostly liberals one can safely assume) who rank Obama as no more than middling. But Brookings decided to do their own survey of academic political scientists, and some of it is rather brutal for The One: First, President Obama »

“Energy romanticism” is perhaps the single greatest intellectual failing of environmentalists—the dreamy view that we can generate 95 quads of energy with puppy dog treadmills, unicorn flopsweat, and of course their beloved wind and solar. (Of course, most enviros say “What’s a ‘quad’?” when I ask for even a cursory inventory of energy sources that would supply America’s annual energy use.) At the base of this is near total illiteracy »

The Wall Street Journal mentions this morning that our now-socialized health care sector is filing panicked Supreme Court briefs in the upcoming King v. Burwell case that emphasize not legal arguments but the disruption to their business model if Obamacare’s state subsidies are struck down. In other words, they mostly submitted policy briefs to the Supreme Court—not legal briefs. I wonder if their lawyers gave them the appropriate policy wonk »

With a new polar vortex putting the northeast under a deep freeze again (it is something like -10 degrees here in Syracuse where I am at present), the cause of college fossil fuel divestment is suffering a bit of a setback. Yale activists have had to postpone (indefinitely) their divestment rally today because of the cold: With the first-ever Global Divestment Day scheduled for this weekend, Fossil Free Yale looks »

So which is the worst news of the week if you are a denizen of the liberal media: Brian Williams getting the slow-motion sack, or Jon Stewart leaving The Daily Show? We’re not done smacking Williams around since more and more tall tales are emerging, and of course we’re never done smacking Obama around. I think this fellow flunked his price theory class: Wait–can the BBC really identify someone this »

I find the net neutrality controversy boring and tiresome, but also easy to sort out. As Glenn Reynolds put it, nothing says forward-looking for the 21st century like a regulated utility. When you have large industry groups fighting each other, that’s when you want the government to stay out. The history of regulated network industries, whether transportation or communication or energy, is threefold: first, regulators reorganized the industry into a »

In the latest installment of Bill Voegeli’s series the Claremont Institute’s “American Mind” series, Bill discusses his chapter of The Pity Party entitled “Liberal Bullshit.” It’s worth viewing if for no other reason than to enjoy how fully Charles Kesler channels William F. Buckley’s old mannerisms from “Firing Line.” »

Canada, America’s largest trading partner and largest foreign supplier of oil, has been amazingly patient over Obama’s clearly insincere dithering over approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Back when I was still in Washington at AEI, Ken Green and I would occasionally put together panel discussions that included Keystone issues, and not only would the Canadian embassy decline to send anyone to participate, they didn’t even want to register for »

Martin Heidegger’s “Rector’s Address” at Freiburg University in 1933 was one of the milestones—and therefore lowest points—of the rise of Nazism in Germany, as his profession that Nazism represented the “inner truth and greatness of the German people” was prelude to his purging the university of Jewish faculty and students. I’ve been wondering how long before this sentiment re-emerged explicitly in American universities, especially those enamored of anti-Israel gestures such »

Thought experiment: Just imagine what the media and liberals would be saying if this idea came from a conservative or Republican (hat tip to Breitbart): Bloomberg Suggests Banning Young Minority Males from Gun Ownership Speaking to the Aspen Institute on February 6, Michael Bloomberg said cities should ban young minority males from owning guns, both as an effort to reduce crime and to keep those minority males “alive.” According to The »

Coincident to John’s notice yesterday of the latest campus silliness at the University of Minnesota, my cover story on “The Death of the University” is out today in National Review. The article is partly a memoir of my year at Boulder, which builds into a general critique of the ailments of most universities today. The story is behind a paywall (though 25 cents for the article by itself!), but here’s »